Chapter XXVI

Viola stood in the doorway looking at Jim thoughtfully. She was wondering how she was going to talk for half an hour to a man who came to dinner in a blue serge suit.

Mr. Egerton had warned her that Jim Barton would be early, and that he wanted her to be particularly nice to him.

‘The fellow can do me a great deal of harm,’ he had explained, ‘That’s why I’ve asked him to dinner.

‘He isn’t any class at all and your mother’s horrified. She never understands business. He’s a tremendous speaker and does what he likes with my men; if I could get him to go easy with them for a bit we might avoid a strike—it’ll be extremely inconvenient if they strike before Christmas. And very often a woman’s tact, you know——’

Mr. Egerton trailed away on this tribute to woman, leaving Viola to fill out exactly what he meant by it.

Viola never pressed any of her father’s points. She had an uneasy feeling that he wouldn’t like the pressure, and that if she pressed hard enough she might not like the points.

Her father adored her, and she couldn’t bear to imagine herself ashamed of him. Mr. Egerton was a man full of conscious superiority and the habits of command, but he was too much of a gentleman not to cover these qualities by an exaggerated air of deference as long as he wasn’t being directly opposed. It would have been absurd to connect him with anything at all shabby.

And yet Viola often felt that all he had was unsubstantial, and that behind his safeties of possession and control ran a very small stream of spirit.

She felt instinctively that it wasn’t quite fair to her, or even to a common man, to make her coax him into being accommodating. But she was going to do it. It would have been a more direct violence to Viola’s sense of taste not to fall in with her father’s plans. He counted on her to help him. So she kissed him with an irritated tenderness, and refused to look her scruples in the face.

She guessed that what her father had meant by tact was that she should look particularly nice, so that she took a placid, unhurried hour to dress for the evening.

She wore a dress she had designed for herself; the bodice was a strip of filmy old lace, as light as foam, and the skirt came out all round her in the shape of a butterfly’s wings, pale yellow and dark orange.

She wore her lover’s emeralds, but with a sudden impulse she took them off and put nothing in their place.

‘You’re Mr. Barton, I think,’ she said gently. ‘Won’t you sit down.’

The young man stood there staring at her with immense and curious blue eyes. He seemed unconscious of the need for him to do anything else, but at the sound of her voice he shook hands a little uncertainly and sat down on an uncomfortable chair; he made it look more uncomfortable by crossing his hands over his knees and leaning forward. It was a charming room, and Jim had been admiring it greatly before Viola came in; but he no longer saw it—the green brocade curtains, light as spring leaves against the background of old oak, faded away from him—he ceased to notice the shining splendour of the solid silver candle-sticks in their old cut glass brackets, or the Venetian leather screen with its dim and broken browns and golds.

Instead he saw, as his eyes met Viola’s, a Kingfisher darting its jewelled flight across a sunny stream. Something as solid and as light pierced suddenly into his heart and would not fly away.

‘I’m afraid I’m altogether too early,’ he said humbly after a pause. ‘I came on after a meeting. My home is in Poplar; it was too far to go back.’

‘Poplar,’ Viola repeated thoughtfully. She hadn’t any idea where Poplar was—it might have been some little place in the north of Russia for all she knew to the contrary. ‘Of course, much too far,’ she agreed with a smile. ‘But I’m very glad you came early—I wanted to talk to you, and I’m always shy when everybody is there and expecting me to behave properly. My father tells me you’re like him—awfully interested in working men. I want you to tell me all about them.’

Jim’s eyes grew veiled, his heavy chin, a trifle underhung, swung forward, as he bent to answer her.

‘I’m one of the working men myself,’ he said; ‘I’m not a bit like your father, and you ought to use a stronger word than interested. I’m involved in all their interests.’

She flushed under the weight of his contradiction. It gave her the braced, tingling feeling of a sudden plunge into cold water. It might, when you got used to it, be nice, but it took your breath away.

She had never talked to a man who treated her less as if she were a woman. Jim seemed to force her relentlessly away from her advantages of beauty and of sex. But it was not because her beauty failed to move him.

The last ten years of his life had been a perpetual struggle between Jim and the force of his passions; he was a man ridden by impulses and attractions, and he had taught himself to let the strongest of them be nothing but an incentive to put him on his guard.

‘I don’t know what you want to know about us,’ he said with a sudden, keen, disarming smile, ‘but there’s no harm in your asking.’

Viola thought it a pity that a man with so nice a smile should speak as if he belonged to a class which she had been brought up to think was little better than criminal. She tried to cut him adrift from it.

‘But you’re educated,’ she protested. ‘You can’t really have anything in common with people who don’t think and read?’

‘Oh, I’m on the other side of that barrier,’ said Jim with his curious, twisted smile. ‘I daresay if I’d got culture I might have lost my soul, but I stopped at education, and that only made me rather convinced to stick to my class. All the thought and reading in the world, Miss Egerton, aren’t confined to the few clever people who have time to do them in. The rest of us pick up a thing or two!

‘If you were to go to a working men’s meeting you would discover that I’m rather below the average.’

‘I don’t think I should discover that,’ said Viola. ‘But I thought working men never read anything but newspapers and spent their evenings in public houses?’

Jim groaned. ‘There,’ he said. ‘You would think _that_, and you think we’re ignorant! Why the working man who says the archbishop is walking about in boots paid for out of his pocket, doesn’t know _less_ what he’s talking about! Of course we’ve none of us had much chance of education. Do you know the State closes its normal benefits in that direction at thirteen? But something can be done if you’ve a mind for it—and a good many of us have nowadays. Only it’s hard not to get beaten out of the race by too heavy a load to start with. And you’re right—drink’s a curse! If public houses could only be made _more_ public, with food and fun in them—but then the poor brewers would have to suffer, wouldn’t they? And we all know about the widows and orphans who seem invariably to put their savings into beer. But it’s just as much a mistake, even while we’re keeping all the widows and orphans’ heads out of water, by the drink monopoly, to suppose all working men drink as to suppose all pretty girls flirt—they don’t, do they?’

Viola stiffened. This young man was not her equal, and he was behaving as if he was, while quite rightly asserting that he wasn’t.

She put him in his place, but she did it gently. His eyes went on laughing, even after this uncomfortable operation had been successfully performed.

‘It seems such a pity,’ she said, ignoring what she thought he should not have said, ‘that working men won’t understand what is good for them.’ She was going on, but Jim interrupted her.

‘I suppose they’re like the rest of us,’ he said. ‘They prefer what’s attractive. It’s not in me to blame them, Miss Egerton.’

Viola frowned a little.

‘My father is always arranging lectures,’ she went on steadily, ‘and excellent classes for his men who want to come—but so few of them ever do.’

‘Do you like lectures?’ Jim asked with apparent submission. ‘I always think they’re rather like being told how to behave.’

The colour rose suddenly under Viola’s clear, pale skin. He was literally the only man who had ever made her blush. But she decided it was because he was the only man who had ever been rude to her.

‘Sometimes,’ she said coldly, ‘even that is necessary.’

‘Still,’ said Jim with unshakable good humour, ‘people won’t pay a penny a night for it—or a shilling the course, I forget which. Wonderfully little if you get what you like, but an awful lot if you don’t.’

Viola reminded herself that her mission was to conciliate, so she dropped the subject of lectures.

‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if you know, Mr. Barton, how much my father cares about his dockers? I think he would do anything for their good—and it seems such a mistake for you not to work together, doesn’t it? I always think we lose so much force by our lack of unity.’

‘If good was jam,’ Jim answered, ‘and your father could keep it in a cupboard and spoon it out regularly to the men, I believe he’d give them quite a lot.

‘He’s a benevolent despot, as I expect you are really, and you won’t mind my saying that from my point of view they’re the worst sort, because it’s so hard to make up one’s mind to do them in!’

‘I don’t see why you should suppose that necessary,’ objected Viola, ‘if you admit we’re benevolent.’

‘Oh, but good’s not jam,’ said Jim. ‘It’s something men ought to get for themselves if their conditions enable them to do it, and if not, they’ve got to alter the conditions, and while the conditions are being altered benevolent despots will have to rip. Unfortunately the process of ripping is extremely painful; and, naturally enough, the benevolent despots think it awfully wrong. What they can’t understand is that the sacredness of a good position is only felt by the people who have it.

‘Look at your father, for instance. It’s very difficult for him, because he’s made the conditions, to see that they need altering. They fit him all right, and while he’s kindly supplying his jam there we are trying to pull the ground from under his feet! I’m afraid it isn’t likely that we can act together, Miss Egerton.’

Viola tried to steady her mind to answer him, but her wits felt like scattered birds, and all the while something in her answered him—his eyes had the sparkle of a frosty morning, and the force behind them invaded her like the drive of the sea.

She shifted her ground with a sense of a precarious foot-hold.

‘Think of what my father gives,’ she said eagerly. ‘His contribution is not to be compared to the men’s—he gives his capital and his brains; and he takes all the risks. A big shipping business with its cut-throat competition, and its constant accidents, is an immense responsibility. He knows better than the men under what conditions it can be profitably run, and it is not fair to speak as if his perfectly reasonable returns make the conditions of his men’s work harder. He has to study the trade as a whole, and you forget, while they get their wages paid exactly the same, he has the losses as well as the gains for his share of the business.’

The laughter died out of Jim’s eyes. She saw for the first time the hard, fighting look which made him a formidable and not too merciful antagonist.

He did not answer her at once. Indeed for a moment he had forgotten her.

His eyes saw instead the row upon row of small gray houses, interminable and monotonous, about the distant docks. The sunk, drab life of the men he lived amongst, the pallor and ugliness of their youth, which had been built for strength and beauty, shook his heart. The thought of the neglected, tired children crying in the gutters and the dust, made bitter lines come into his hard young face.

‘Oh, you don’t see,’ he said in a different tone. ‘You can’t see. You’re not looking straight.

‘You talk of what men like your father put into their businesses—but you don’t reckon what they take out of them!

‘All we want, we others, is to be in a position to put in as much. We’d stand our chance of the losses; you don’t live on the edge of nothing and fear losses. What we want is to have leisure enough, quiet enough, comfort enough, to make our brains _tell_. You see, it’s waste for a man to have his brain pinched out of him, by dirt and bad air, and the food which comes from such conditions. You say, look what your father gives—but have you thought what we do? We give toil. We don’t live far off from the Godforsaken mud flats where the docks have to be, in a house like this, to have our times off in comfort. We don’t start work at ten after a breakfast as big as all our meals put together, and a thousand times more nourishing, and we don’t go to a luxurious office in a motor car, and sit for a few hours giving orders, with clean hands, from a leather arm-chair.

‘A man’s toil is himself, and when we’ve used ourselves up for the day, where’s the margin to be amiable and brilliant—or even to be intelligent and decent, when we come home in the evening, though the majority of work-people _are_ intelligent and decent?

‘I tell you what we want is margin, and we’ve got to have it!’

Jim did not raise his voice as he finished, but it had a peculiar compelling quality, as if he added to the words he used the whole force of his personality. He confronted you out of his arguments, as the angel confronted the baffled Adam and Eve, with his righteous flaming sword.

Viola’s face grew set, and her charming arched brows ceased to look like an inquiring flower. It was horrid of this man to talk as if tiresome and painful things had anything to do with them, when they had invited him to dinner. It was especially unfair to say that Viola didn’t see straight, when she went on seeing straight even after it had made her uncomfortable. She didn’t know any girls of her own age who danced properly and were half as sorry for the poor.

She looked over Jim’s head and asked if he had noticed when he came in if it was still raining?

And then he laughed at her. He deliberately laughed at her, as if she was a naughty but engaging child.

‘Come,’ he said, ‘you mustn’t bear me malice for giving you my point of view. You had me here to convert me to yours, didn’t you? Well—I’ll have to show you first what to convert me from!’

Viola trembled with annoyance. How dared he speak as if he had been lured into a trap? She, who was the cheese in the trap, rebelled more against Jim’s audacity in discovering it than she had against the idea of the deception.

Viola wanted some one to step in front of her and take her place, to fight down the rising sense of excitement and alarm this strange man gave her, and to make him look as cheap as she knew he wasn’t, and as, for a moment, he had made her feel that she was. And as she looked around her with desperate eyes for an intervention, the door opened and they fell upon her chosen champion.

Reginald Ainley stood there fingering his effective monocle.

Viola gave a little sigh of relief. He was immaculately dressed, as smooth as a peach, and as slender as a walking stick.

She thought for a moment that he had all the virtues and would be the answer to the strange breathlessness at her heart.

Her eyes ran hurriedly from one man to the other, unconsciously measuring them.

Jim was an inch shorter than Ainley, he was more heavily built, there was a mixture of strength in his clumsiness and of clumsiness in his strength. His rough-hewn, unfinished face had no attraction beyond the beauty of his blue, steady eyes, and of those even he was unconscious, for no one had ever pulled him together by appealing to his vanity.

There was no clumsiness at all in Ainley. He was straight-backed and as supple as a racer. He looked like a classical Rodin, and Jim like one of the sculptor’s later rough-hewn works, when he wished to arrive at the confusion and grandeur of the soul and left the fine small finish of the animal to look after itself.

‘I’ve had the pleasure,’ said Ainley after a quick, appreciative glance at Viola, ‘of hearing you speak, Mr. Barton, mingled with the gall of disagreeing with all you had to say—but I’m delighted to meet you for the first time in private life.’

‘You’ve forgotten,’ said Jim. ‘We’ve met before, Mr. Ainley. I’m that boy off a barge who was so out of place at Warren Manor.’

Ainley’s eyes narrowed; he was more disconcerted than he cared to show.

‘Now, that’s very odd,’ he said pleasantly; ‘two fellows from old Bligh’s knocking against each other after all these years—ten, isn’t it? I will say this for you, Barton: you’re uncommonly changed.’

‘No,’ said Jim. ‘I’ve had three hundred a year left me, and been to a University, but I’m not changed—nor, from the look of you are you.’

The hostility behind Ainley’s smile deepened, and yet it was Jim who looked the least at ease of the two men.

Ainley turned to Viola and told her an amusing anecdote of the Blighs. It was a friendly anecdote and pleasantly included Jim.

Viola did not listen very carefully; she thought it was a pity Mr. Barton hadn’t any manners. She wondered if Reggie could have convinced him that he was wrong. She wondered, if Reggie had tried, whether she herself would have been convinced that Mr. Barton was wrong?

He had been horrid, but to be horrid is not necessarily (though Viola would have liked to think it was) to be wrong.